September 21, 2009
Morgan Stanley Matrix at MAX
Next month at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles, Børre Wessel (Lab49) and myself will be presenting Matrix, the next-generation sales and trading platform from Morgan Stanley.
The session is entitled, "Building Matrix – Scaling Flex for a Large Trading Application" and it will cover our experiences as we worked on the client-side architecture of Matrix, together with a large team of developers. We will discuss the patterns and practices that made the delivery possible — modularization, dependency management, performance tuning, inversion-of-control, etc. — and the challenges we faced along the way, providing guidance for other large-scale enterprise Flex projects.
For more information, put on your headphones and check out the Morgan Stanley Matrix micro-site. Some other resources are listed below. Hope to see you there!
- Morgan Stanley raises the bar for rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash Platform technologies
- Morgan Stanley's Matrix: An App From the Future
- Morgan Stanley taps Adobe Flex framework for new trading platform
Posted by tsugden at 9:40 PM | Comments (2)
September 4, 2009
Eliminate Common Bad Practices with FlexPMD
Adobe Technical Services are pleased to release FlexPMD to the community. FlexPMD is a new open-source tool for improving code quality. It works by analyzing ActionScript and MXML source files to identify common bad practices, like over-long classes or functions, reliance on magic strings, unused parameters, and many other programming mistakes or misjudgments. It can even spot code that might be causing performance problems, and furthermore, the ruleset can be customized and extended, to include rules specific to the coding conventions of your own project.
FlexPMD can be launched from the command line, but the best practice is to invoke it from your Ant or Maven continuous integration build scripts. In this case, a report will be generated each time a build is performed, describing the violations of your chosen ruleset. As soon as someone checks in their fancy new 1,000 line algorithm with nested loops, numeric variable names and a gaggle of change-watchers, the red flag will be raised. The report produced by Flex PMD allows simple coding mistakes to be identified and corrected immediately, when the cost is far cheaper than attempting to refactor a system that has been decaying for months.
Another benefit of FlexPMD is that code reviews become more valuable. Since FlexPMD can automatically identify the common problems, code reviewers are left to reflect on the deeper issues, like domain modeling, separation of concerns, proper encapsulation, and so on.
To find out more about FlexPMD and start using it on your own projects, follow these links to Adobe Open Source:
- About FlexPMD
- Download FlexPMD
- How To Invoke FlexPMD
- How To Interpret FlexPMD Results
- How to Add Your Own Rule
Credit goes to Xavier Agnetti for conceiving and leading this effort, with support and contributions from many in the Technical Services organization and other parts of Adobe.
Posted by tsugden at 7:21 AM | Comments (0)